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how to handle the wilderness. When a refugee ends up dead in Rourton Square, you can bet it was a hunter who dragged him back in from the wild. I won’t have long until the hunters are sent for – but in the meantime, I’m going to play this hand for all it’s worth.
    Then I spot it. A ditch full of dirty water, frosted over by the chill of the night. The thought of diving into that water – cold, muddy, maybe diseased – makes me hesitate for a second. But I can survive being cold and sick. I can’t survive a bullet through the throat. So I clamber sideways and plunge into the pit.
    It’s cold. The shock is worse than falling from the wall, worse than slamming into tree-trunks or slipping down a furious richie’s roof-tiles. It’s like being whacked with a mallet. Every cell in my body screams, and maybe my mouth is screaming too, but all that escapes my lips is a torrent of froth.
    I can’t help it. I thrust my head back above the surface and suck down a desperate breath. The guards aren’t in view yet, but I can hear them tramp­ling towards me through the trees. I empty my lungs, then suck down the deepest breath I can manage. It’s not much – my lungs feel as limp as wet fabric – but there’s no time to try again.
    I plunge below the waterline, crouching in the mud at the bottom of the ditch. The muck and leaf litter should be enough to hide my body. I clench my eyes shut after a few seconds, because the floating grit makes them sting and I can’t see anyway. Any sounds from the surface are distorted, rippling like a dodgy radio wave.
    When I was little, my father had a radio. It was a huge wooden box with copper knobs and strange wires poking from its back. Normally only richies can afford such technology but my father worked as a rat-catcher at the alchemics factory, using his Beast proclivity to stop rodents from chewing the wires. He won his radio in a staff lottery. It was a reject from the batch, with a wonky receiver that made the newsreaders’ voices fizz and crackle. It only worked for a few hours at a time before we had to wait for the alchemy to recharge.
    Sometimes, when we couldn’t afford coal for the fire, my father would herd our family into the living room and say, ‘Tonight is the night for a grand ball.’ We would don our finest clothes – I still remember my mother’s dress, as blue as the morning sky – and position ourselves on the living room floor. Then my father would switch on his radio, twiddle the knobs to find a music station, and we would dance the warmth back into our bodies.
    The distorted crackle of that radio comes back to me now for the first time in years. The ditch water has that same fuzzy quality, that blurring in my ears. But instead of waiting to dance, I wait to die. My lungs hurt already.
    I force myself to count to ten – a long, slow, torturous count.
    One. Two. Three.
    I need to breathe . . . 
    Four. Five.
    Just a little sip of air . . . That’s not too greedy, is it? That’s not too much to ask?
    Six. Seven. Eight.
    I think my body is going to explode. The guards must be gone by now. They were tearing through the woods at such a pace, and I can’t hear crashing overhead, so perhaps they’ve been and gone already and the gurgle of muddy water meant I never even knew . . . 
    Nine.
    Almost there . . . Almost . . . 
    Ten!
    I burst upwards like a flare, a sodden firecracker from a turret of ditch water. I suck down air with a horrible rattle, again and again, until the ache in my lungs subsides and the panic in my skull begins to fade.
    Then, and only then, do I stop to look around.
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    There’s no sign of the guards.
    Broken branches hang, splintered, from nearby tree trunks. The guards have been and gone, oblivious to the girl in the water beneath them. Against all odds, I have